The flames spat out by the supersonic fighter’s two engines left a trail of fire in the air, as if a comet had cut through the blue of the sky in broad daylight. Weighing ten tons, the dark gray MiG-29 was armed with four air-to-air missiles, six air-to-ground missiles, a supply of laser-guided bombs and a thirty-millimeter gun with a capability of 150 rounds per minute. At one point, one of the Pérez-Pérez brothers informed Major Palacios, the MiG-23 pilot, that his radar had detected the presence of “a very large boat” sailing below the planes. “It’s under me,” the major replied. “It looks like a cruise ship.” The servicemen were referring to the Majesty of the Seas, a 300-meter-long luxury transatlantic liner, weighing seventy thousand tons. That afternoon, with more than 2,000 passengers on board, the Majesty was returning from a three-day mini-cruise from Miami through Key West, Nassau, Coco Cay and back via Key West to Miami. Both on the way out and on the way back, while sailing between Key West and Coco Cay, a small island measuring seven by ten kilometers, the ship wound round the entire north coast of Cuba, always avoiding crossing over the demarcation line of Cuban territorial waters. Picked up by nine radar devices—seven in the United States and two in Cuba—communication between the Havana control tower and the two planes took on dramatic tones shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon:
TOWER TO MIG-29: What’s your altitude?
MIG-29 TO TOWER: One thousand seven hundred meters. We are observing three planes in the air, sometimes flying together, sometimes apart.
MIG-23 TO TOWER: I’m doing a search to the left and can see one of them, coming from the north.
TOWER TO MIG-23: What’s your altitude?
MIG-23 TO TOWER: Two hundred meters.
TOWER TO MIG-29 AND MIG-23: Switch on your radars.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: Switched on.
MIG-23 TO TOWER: Switched on.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: The target is in sight. It’s a small plane.
MIG-23 TO MIG-29: I’m going up to two thousand meters.
TOWER TO MIG-23: What color is it?
MIG-23 TO TOWER: It’s a blue and white Cessna 337, flying at low altitude.
It was the Spirit of Miami, the second to take off from Opa-Locka two hours before. With a history of almost 150 flights on behalf of the Brothers, Carlos Costa seemed unfazed by the presence of Cuban warplanes. Confident that Cuba would not have the nerve to bring down North American civil aircraft, the pilot’s only fear was encountering the air maneuver known as “forced landing interception.” In these cases, a craft was surrounded by military helicopters that forced it to fly in circles until, without sufficient fuel to return to the United States, the pilot had no alternative but to land on Cuban soil—with all the associated risks. So, seeing the the MiG-29 maneuvering in the air in front of him, Carlos Costa’s only comment to his co-pilot Pablo Morales was: “We’ve got a MiG for company. There’s a MiG flying around us …” Richard Nuccio’s terrible premonition, however, seemed fated to come true. The recording of the radio dialogue between the Havana control tower and the two planes reveals that at twenty minutes past three in the afternoon, the MiG-29 came face to face with Costa’s and Morales’s Cessna:
MIG-29 TO TOWER: He’s in my sights.
MIG-23 TO TOWER: We need permission.
TOWER TO MIG-29: Permission to destroy.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: I’m going to fire.
TOWER TO MIG-29: Permission to fire.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: Here I go, dammit!
TOWER TO MIG-29: Did you fire?
MIG-29 TO TOWER: We goddam hit him! We hit him!
MIG-29 TO MIG-23: We ripped his cojones [balls] apart!
MIG-23 TO MIG-29: Wait! Wait to see where he went down!
MIG-29 TO MIG-23: Mark the spot where we dumped him.
MIG-23 TO MIG-29: This one’s not going to fuck with us again.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: We’re going up. We’re coming back.
TOWER TO MIG-29: Stay there, flying in circles.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: Above the target?
TOWER TO MIG-29: Correct.
TOWER TO MIG-29 AND MIG-23: Climb to four thousand meters. Remain above the destroyed target and maintain low speed.
Six minutes later the MiG-29’s radar detected the presence of Habana DC, the third Hermanos plane. It was a Cessna, prefix N5485S, piloted by the eldest in the group, the experienced, forty-five-year-old ex-marine Armando Alejandre Jr., who had spent two years as a voluntary combatant in the Vietnam War. His co-pilot was Mario de la Peña, at twenty-five years old the youngest of those flying that Saturday. At twenty-six minutes past three, the Cuban pilot’s voice came on the radio again:
MIG-29 TO TOWER: We have another plane ahead.
TOWER TO MIG-29 AND MIG-23: Don’t lose sight of him.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: He’s in the same area where the first one went down.
TOWER TO MIG-29 AND MIG-23: Stay there, above him.
TOWER TO MIG-29: Is he still in sight?
MIG-29 TO TOWER: We’re on top of him.
TOWER TO MIG-29: Permission to fire.
MIG-29 TO TOWER: He’s destroyed! Homeland or death, dammit!
A few dozen meters away in the N2506, José Basulto reacted with an uncontrolled burst of laughter and a shout at the downing he’d just witnessed: “MiGs! They’re about to fire at us!” In the back seat of the twin-engine plane, the terrified Silvia Iriondo grabbed a rosary from her handbag and began to pray. In panic at the danger of having his plane too reduced to dust by a missile strike, Basulto shut down all of the Cessna’s communication systems to avoid identification by the MiGs’ radars, veered northwards and made his getaway, flying a few meters above the surface of the sea.
The news of the downing of the two planes and the death of the four pilots hit Florida like a hurricane. Ana Margarita only found out what had happened at the end of the afternoon, when the Argentinian Brothers pilot Guillermo Lares phoned to summon Roque to a press conference that Basulto had called for early evening at the Opa-Locka hangar. Not very convincingly, she explained that her husband was busy on a job outside Miami and had forgotten his cell phone at home. Once radio and TV stations began breaking news of the incident, her phone didn’t stop ringing—friends and family were worried in case Juan Pablo had been in one of the doomed planes. She repeated the same answer to all of them: “No, thank God, Roque wasn’t in either of the planes.” Inexplicably, however, she had received no news from her husband—not even a collect call to say he was OK. Nothing, nothing at all. Unable to eat or sleep, Ana Margarita stayed up all night and spent Sunday glued to the television, waiting for any information that could help her find answers to Juan Pablo’s mysterious behavior.
The only fresh news was the disagreement between the American and Cuban governments with respect to the location where the two planes had been shot down. In a threatening official briefing, Secretary of State Warren Christopher characterized the act as “a blatant violation of international law and a violation of the norms of civilized behavior.” He affirmed that the United States had “reached the conclusion” that the attack had taken place over international waters, and he ended with a promise: “prompt and appropriate” measures would be adopted by President Clinton in response to what had happened. “We will not limit ourselves to a multilateral action,” growled the secretary. “We’ll be considering actions the United States can take on its own.” The Cuban foreign ministry responded by accusing Christopher of “lying in a cynical fashion,” asserting that they had “unequivocal proof” that the two craft—dubbed “pirate planes”—were flying over Cuba’s territorial waters. Havana placed at the American authorities’ disposal maps that showed, minute-by-minute, everything that had been picked up by Cuban radar, recordings of the communications between the control tower and the two fighters, and even the personal belongings of one of the dead pilots that had been retrieved by the Coast Guard in Cuban waters north of the capital. Clinging to God knows what hopes, Ana Margarita didn’t notice when a TV news anchor read out the last paragraph of the Cuban official note, in which lay the key for her to understand what had happened with her husband:
Finally, to leave in no doubt that Mr. Christopher is telling shameless lies, we inform you that there is among us a pilot from one of these groups that carried out so many actions against our country. He was with them until a few hours ago. This pilot knows a lot. There is irrefutable evidence that these groups are far from performing humanitarian actions, as Mr. Christopher so ridiculously alleges. They constitute a terrorist mafia that hatched bloody plots against our people. We are ready to discuss these matters with Mr. Christopher at the United Nations Security Council or wherever he thinks fit.
Everything pointed to the pilot to whom he was referring as being Juan Pablo Roque, but Ana Margarita would only know this hours later. Sunday night came and her husband gave no signs of life. Again, relying on sleeping tablets, she fell into bed only to wake up the next morning to an uproar coming from the street—a rare disturbance in the placid suburb of Hialeah. She looked out the window, frightened, and saw she was besieged by radio and television vehicles with small parabolic antennas stuck on their hoods, reporters brandishing microphones and cameramen pointing threatening cameras toward the doors and windows of her nice yellow house. The telephone rang, and an agitated friend yelled at her to switch on CNN. She pressed the remote and there on the TV screen in the couple’s bedroom was the smiling face of her husband. Clean-shaven, hair trimmed, wearing the Rolex but, as Ana Margarita observed, not his wedding ring, Roque was in Havana with the CNN international correspondent Lucia Newman, giving his first interview to foreign media. The false defector, or the repentant defector as he described himself, denied being a spy for Cuba or that he even belonged to the State’s intelligence personnel. He claimed that he had, in fact, defected from Cuba, but had regretted it after four years in Miami. He said that he had been recruited by the FBI to spy not only on the Brothers, but on practically all of Florida’s important anti-Castroist organizations—and that the real function of agent Oscar Montoto, Mr. Slingman, was to investigate violations of international neutrality law by the anti-Castroist groups of the United States. He also told how Montoto had warned him not to fly with the Brothers on February 24, “because Cuba was determined to shoot down any plane that invaded its airspace,” and accused Basulto of smuggling weapons and explosives for the purpose of mounting terrorist attacks on the Island. But Ana Margarita only felt her heart beat faster when the journalist wanted to know about him, what his fondest memory was of the four years he had spent in the United States. Juan Pablo Roque floored his ex-wife on the other side of the Florida Straits when he smilingly affirmed that the thing he would miss most would be “my Jeep.” Hours earlier he had given a long interview on Cuban state TV, where he was introduced only as “a member of the counterrevolutionary organization Brothers to the Rescue”—without any information on the circumstances under which he had left Cuba, or how he had returned.
The following week was taken up with a flurry of protests, condemnations and press conferences called by Florida’s anti-Castroist organizations. On Monday, the United States ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, who a year later would be appointed secretary of state by Bill Clinton, gave a speech condemning the Cuban government for shooting down the two planes, ending with a retort to the MiG-29 pilot’s words after the first shot. The small, energetic ambassador surprised everyone by using language hardly appropriate for an elegant woman on a solemn platform such as this one. “Frankly, this is not cojones,” Albright said, raising a stern finger. “This is cowardice.” On the lips of a respectable grandmother, the vulgar word packed an even stronger punch. The mayor of Miami, the Cuban American Joe Carollo, announced that he would issue a decree to rename four of the city’s avenues after the dead pilots. So far, however, the reactions in New York, Miami and Washington remained on the level of rhetoric. The first concrete measure against Cuba would be divulged that night by the White House. Convinced that neither of the two planes had invaded Cuban air space—“and even if they had, to shoot them down would still be a violation of international norms”—President Clinton announced a series of punitive measures against the Island’s government, as he recalled in his autobiography:
“I suspended chartered flights to Cuba, restricted travel by Cuban officials in the United States, expanded the reach of Radio Martí … and asked Congress to authorize compensation out of Cuba’s blocked assets in the United States to the families of the men who were killed.”
The entrance of the American president onto the scene forced Fidel Castro to deal publicly with the matter. During a ceremony for the masses in the province of Matanzas, the Cuban leader referred to the downing of the planes as an incident that could have been avoided:
“We foresaw this outcome, and we repeatedly warned the United States of the danger. But you saw the violations of our airspace, you saw the increasingly audacious adventures above our capital, something that no country in the world would stand for. Now they’ve invented that the planes were civilian craft and that they were flying over international waters … They were warplanes, used by the United States in the Vietnam War.”
Sure enough, two months later, the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recognized that at least one of the planes that belonged to the Brothers, still had United States Air Force insignia painted on its fuselage. None of that cut any ice with the American government. At that moment, Washington seemed interested only in settling scores with Havana. Ten days after the shoot-down, live on national television, Bill Clinton ratified the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, aka the “Helms-Burton bill,” which had been lying around in the drawers of the White House since its approval four months earlier. In doing so, Clinton, as he would acknowledge in his memoirs, was not moved solely by the desire to provoke internal changes in Cuba, but also by his electoral interests. “Supporting the bill was good election-year politics in Florida,” recalls the president, recognizing that the decision “undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes within Cuba.” Intended to tighten even further the economic stranglehold on the Island and to restrict the authority of the US president to suspend the embargo without congressional approval, the law had been drafted by Republican Senator Jesse Helms, from North Carolina, and Democratic Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, both known for their attachment to the most conservative sectors of Congress and to the Cuban community in exile. Thanks to the Republican opposition, which won a majority in Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, the law had been approved in October 1995 with two thirds of the votes, rendering a future presidential veto unfeasible.
Besides incorporating all the restrictions imposed on Cuba since 1962, the bill sanctioned by Clinton in 1996 was an explicit way of coercing the international community to adhere to the American embargo against the Island. The arsenal of sanctions threatened to deny entry visas to the United States to directors of any foreign company doing business—the verb used in the law is trafficking—with the Cuban government, and stipulated fines that could reach, as in fact some did, hundreds of millions of dollars. Merchant ships, no matter under what flag, that moored at Cuban ports were subjected to a quarantine prohibiting them from using American ports for a period of six months. Foreign investors and companies that exploited the assets or occupied the properties of American citizens expropriated by Cuba would be sued in US civil courts. On paper, the prescriptions seemed made-to-measure to consummate the economic strangulation of the Island that had begun with the embargo in 1961, and worsened in 1991 with the end of the USSR. If the United States could get it implemented, the act threatened to be the requiem mass of the Cuban Revolution. Before Havana even reacted, however, there was a chorus of condemnation of the extraterritorial character of the Helms-Burton Act: the European Union, the World Trade Organization, Unesco, Unicef and even the Organization of American States (OAS), from which Cuba had been suspended in 1962 and which rarely opposed Washington, harshly criticized Clinton’s decision to enact the package of measures—even though he had no constitutional alternative. As far as these organizations were concerned, in practice the Helms-Burton Act forced the world to choose between doing business with Cuba and doing business with the United States, in blatant violation of international laws and treaties. Even a former Clinton ally would deplore the decision to enact such a draconian law: “In my opinion, signing the Helms-Burton Act was a serious error of Clinton’s,” ex-president Jimmy Carter would say later.
The law’s first clash with reality occurred when a letter from the American government arrived at the offices of Sol Meliá Hotels and Resorts. Six years previous, the largest hotel company in Spain had become Cuba’s main business partner. It was to be expected that the majority of the dozens of hotels built on the Island by the Spanish giant stood on properties expropriated by the Revolution, but the company didn’t seem to be intimidated by Washington’s threats. “None of our executives are all that interested in visiting Disney World,” mocked Meliá’s spokesman. “And, if forced to choose between the two countries, the group would not hesitate to close its network of hotels in Florida.” Anybody engaged in business—or in trafficking, as the American government put it—with Cuba would be notified of the risks. Not even the big multinational conglomerates were immune, like Sherritt International, the largest Canadian mining company, which was exploiting nickel deposits in Moa in eastern Cuba, or the French firm Pernod Ricard, distributors of Havana Club rum in Europe.
In Brazil, the State Department tried to put pressure on the Souza Cruz, a cigarette company controlled by British American Tobacco (BAT). One of the biggest taxpayers in the country and holding 80 percent of the Brazilian cigarette market, with an annual production of 4 billion units, Souza Cruz had built a modern factory in Cuba as a joint venture in equal ownership with the State of Cuba. In their first notification, the American government called the company’s attention to the fact that the property it used in Havana had belonged to the American firm Henry Clay & Co.—producing famous brands like Lucky Strike and Pall Mall in Cuba, until it was confiscated in 1960 by the communist government—which constituted a violation of American law and exposed the transgressor to sanctions imposed by the United States. The next step was a visit by the American consul to the Souza Cruz headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. Received by the company vice president, Milton Cabral, the diplomat took almost two hours to enumerate the articles of the Helms-Burton Act infringed by Souza Cruz’s “trafficking” with Castro’s government. Just like his colleague at Sol Meliá, the Brazilian executive refused to be bossed around. “Our association with Cuba is an initiative by Souza Cruz, a Brazilian company that conforms to Brazilian law. Our majority shareholder is British, and answers to the laws of the United Kingdom,” Cabral replied, politely but conclusively. “As such, American laws, with all due respect, have no effect on our business.” The consul did not know that such self-assurance was actually based on a fact missed by the State Department’s research. Months before the enactment of Helms-Burton, Henry Clay & Co. had been acquired by BAT—which meant that Souza Cruz in Cuba was operating on its own property.
Although it failed to break the back of the Cuban Revolution, Helms-Burton would continue to do damage throughout the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The ammunition used by the State Department, acting in conjunction with the trade, defense and treasury departments, hit targets of all sizes. The victim could equally be a giant like the Credit Suisse Bank—fined $536 million by the US attorney general for having performed thirty operations transferring funds to Cuba—or any American citizen who made an innocent tourist trip to the Island. Not even White House officials would escape the long arm of this anti-Castroist plunder, as testified by the case of Fred Burks, Clinton’s official translator. Three years after the law came into force, Burks traveled to Havana with his girlfriend, via Cancún, for a concert by the Buena Vista Social Club, a very popular band at that time. Monitored by the Department of the Treasury, on returning to Washington Burks and his girlfriend were fined $15,000 as a punishment for their night out with the musicians Ibrahim Ferrer and Compay Segundo. From the diplomatic and political points of view, it was not just a question of going back to square one. It was worse. From February 24, 1996, onwards, relations between Cuba and the United States became increasingly somber, hostile and aggressive. Of all the advances made since Jimmy Carter’s administration, the only ones to remain standing were the agreements that had ended the migration crisis two years earlier.
The events of that fateful Saturday had devastating effects on Florida’s Cuban community. Following Juan Pablo Roque’s revelations on television, Miami’s atmosphere had become stifling. The first casualty would be a member of FBI staff: publicly exposed by the Cuban, who had even given out his phone and pager numbers, agent Oscar Montoto was taken out of circulation and put temporarily on ice. The climate of distrust and suspicion poisoned the anti-Castroist organizations even more. The organizations in which Roque had operated or those with which he’d been friendly, like the Cuban American National Foundation, the Brothers and the Democracy Movement, tried to reconstruct the pilot’s steps in the weeks leading up to the escape and undertook internal investigations looking for answers to the worrying questions they were asking. Was Roque already an agent of the Cuban government when he arrived in the United States, or had he been recruited in Miami? Had he acted alone, or had he left accomplices planted among the exiles? Had the FBI sneaked other informants into the exile groups?
Protected by the pretense of having severed relations with Roque months before his return to Cuba, René managed to wriggle unscathed through the jungle of suspicion which Miami had become. When the dust of distrust had settled, Olga’s husband was contacted by Alex Barbeito and Al Alonso, the FBI agents who, thanks to information passed on by him, had broken open the gang of drug traffickers hiding within the PUND and imprisoned the leader of that anti-Castroist organization, Héctor “El Tigre” Viamonte. The FBI had come out of the incidents of February 24 with a doubly tarnished image. On the one hand, public opinion in general had turned against it once it became known that the FBI had recruited an agent without knowing he was an intelligence officer of the Cuban government. On the other hand, the groups of Cubans in exile and their powerful lobby in Congress were furious when Roque revealed that he was paid by the FBI to spy on the CANF, the Brothers and the Democracy Movement. The proposal Barbeito and Alonso made to René was sensitive: to replace Juan Pablo Roque as an informant in the anti-Castroist organizations in which he was active. The invitation apparently showed that the suspicions that the FBI had other informants planted in the exile groups were unfounded. The Cuban asked for a few days to consider—in reality, he needed the time to consult Havana about how to react. In a letter to Cuba, René drew a rough portrait of the two policemen. He said that Barbeito was a young man between twenty-five and thirty, with brown hair, and of medium build, “apparently” of Cuban origin. “He speaks Spanish well with light English interjections. He is dynamic and spontaneous in his speech. He does not have any visible marks.” His description of Alonso was more detailed:
Alonso is about forty-five years old with lightly tanned fair skin. He is tall and looks strong but not to the point of being athletic. His hair is slightly wavy and he speaks slowly and with a slight effeminate tendency. He is slightly graying. His facial characteristics are very similar to our comrade Miguel. He seems to be quite methodical and capable. In contrast to Alex who always seems ready for action, Alonso seems analytical above all else.
According to the summary sent by René, the two policemen had told him that the need to keep the Cuban community’s political activities under strict control had become fundamental, after the downing of the planes. As they put it, the American government feared being dragged into a military conflict “all because of a little game being played by the provocateurs in Miami.” As for working for the FBI, the Cuban suggested to Havana that the proposal be refused. “It is not logical to lend support to a group with which one supposedly has similar ideas and objectives and from one day to the next offer to spy on that group,” René argued. “To me this seems to be so vile that even these people would be crazy to trust me after I did that.” The Main Center agreed with him. Apart from the risks cited, Cuba had reasons to reinforce the surveillance of the Wasp Network agents over the anti-Castroist groups. The belligerence of the American government raised their spirits and egged on the most radical sectors of the exiles. Smuggling of explosives into Cuban territory and attacks on tourist targets went ahead with increasing intensity. Not even the dramatic death of the four Brothers pilots seemed to have inhibited the anti-Castroist groups’ aggressiveness, since the invasions of Cuban airspace and territorial waters carried on as if nothing had happened. In the twelve months following the destruction of the planes, Cuba was the victim of dozens of aggressions planned and financed in Florida. Thanks to reports sent by the Wasp Network agents, in August Cuban security forces arrested an American citizen who was trying to enter the country with a load of explosives, and in September, a Cuban from Miami was caught landing at Punta Alegre beach, in Ciego de Ávila province, in a vessel loaded with weapons. Information supplied by the two prisoners allowed Cuba to thwart various attacks, but did not put an end to the wave of terrorism. At the end of the year, in an interview with Univisión TV in Miami, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch reaffirmed their determination to continue sponsoring terrorist activities against the Island.
The impunity and cheek with which the confessed masterminds of crimes that had cost dozens of innocent lives moved freely around the United States was exasperating for the Cuban authorities, but there was strictly nothing to be done—except what was already being done by the Wasp Network agents. Fidel believed that, like Jimmy Carter, Clinton was no buffoon. And he felt sure that, were the American president to know more about the past record and extreme dangerousness of these people, he wouldn’t hesitate to put a stop to the provocations originating in or sponsored by Miami. The Comandante had compiled a dossier for Clinton on the topic, but didn’t have trustworthy channels for conveying the document directly to the American president, without risk of it passing through the hands—and under the eyes—of the CIA and the FBI. The solution appeared at the end of April, when a private jet landed at Havana Airport carrying the ex-senator and Democratic ex-candidate for the presidency of the United States, Gary Hart. Besides his political savvy, Hart possessed a privilege of particularly interest to the Cuban president: direct access to Bill Clinton. It remains unclear what could have led a politician of Hart’s importance to make a private trip to Cuba in the midst of the witch-hunt unleashed by Washington against everything that might smack of Castroism. What is known, however, is that on his return to the United States he was carrying in his luggage 200 pages and various videos and cassette tapes, all material prepared under the personal supervision of Fidel Castro. Based largely on the thousands of reports sent in by the Wasp Network to Cuba, the dossier listed, one by one, all of the attacks carried out against the Island since the early 1990s. Each crime came with the details of who had committed it, who had planned it and who had paid for it—all proven by telephone recordings and secretly filmed videos.
Three weeks after Hart received the documentation from Fidel’s hands, on May 24, 1997, a bomb destroyed the premises of the Cuban tourist agency Cubanacán, in Mexico City. The initial investigations showed that the modus operandi and the type of explosives used in the attack were very similar to those used against tourist targets in Cuban territory. The details supplied to the police by the immigration services, when cross-checked with those of hotels in the Mexican capital, pointed to the instigator—or instigators—of the attack being from a country in Central America. The clues coincided with investigations being undertaken by the Wasp Network in Miami. For quite some time the group headed by Hernández-Viramóntez had suspected that mercenaries from Guatemala and El Salvador were being contracted by exiles in Miami to carry out bomb attacks in Cuba and elsewhere. But there was still a piece missing from the puzzle that had yet to fall into place.